The inventive concepts disclosed herein relate to systems and methods for implementing schemes to accept different and disparate representations of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) flight plans and to convert them into common flight representations usable for evaluating potential conflicts, and for providing one or more of flight plan approval/disapproval, and/or flight plan execution restrictions or warnings regarding potentially conflicting manned and unmanned aerial vehicle operations in a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) scheme.
Potential deployment scenarios involving UAS platform operations are increasing as the technology for local and remote control of UAS platforms of all shapes and sizes increases. Governmental, law enforcement, commercial and other types of entities are becoming increasingly aware of, and progressively more comfortable with, the capabilities and benefits of routinely employing UAS platforms for certain mission types. Current mission employment scenarios include all manner of locally-focused and/or wide area surveillance. These include, for example, power line condition monitoring, and track and rail bed condition monitoring, and myriad law enforcement and environmental surveillance taskings. Proposed mission scenarios include various forms of payload/package delivery, and for example employment in crop dusting.
UAS platforms in use today encompass a broad array of platform sizes, onboard sensor capabilities and payload capacities. These UAS platforms include the comparatively larger and more robust, often military-controlled and operated, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly referred to as drones) that fly (1) under the positive control of a pilot or other operator, often situated in a remote fixed location, (2) autonomously under the control of onboard computers executing pre-loaded mission/flight profiles from takeoff to landing, and (3) hybrid missions in which certain phases of the flight envelope or mission scheme are positively controlled by a remote operator while other phases of the flight envelope or mission scheme are autonomously executed by onboard control components. Others of these UAS platforms include a class of locally, generally line-of-sight operated Small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) platforms. Regardless of size or composition, the UAS platforms discussed throughout this disclosure are those that are capable of controlled flight from launch, through in-flight operations, to recovery and/or landing in a manner similar to a conventional piloted airplane or helicopter.
A focus of efforts to support a broader array, and increasing population, of UAS platforms involves the safe integration of all manner of UAS platforms into, for example, the National Airspace System (NAS) of the United States. Operational deconfliction of all aerial platforms is the challenge. Piloted or manned aircraft have the advantage of see and avoid capabilities based on the placement of the pilot in the observation and decision-making loop for operation of the aircraft. Pilots of manned aircraft, whether under positive control in controlled airspace, or operating autonomously in uncontrolled airspace, are ultimately tasked with “seeing” conflicts as they arise, and taking appropriate action, including evasive maneuvering in view of those conflicts. Separately, many manned, as well as certain larger unmanned, aircraft may include sensor suites that may supplement, or effectively replace, see and avoid with certain “sense and avoid” capabilities. These sensor suites provide some level of a proximity monitoring function with regard to other potentially conflicting aerial operations in order that a pilot or other operator may be alerted to the conflict in time to initiate such action as may be appropriate to avoid the conflict.
Simpler, smaller, less expensive, easier-to-operate and less sophisticated UAS platforms are becoming much more prolific. Based on their limited capacity to be autonomously deconflicted from other aircraft operations, it has become of some increased importance to provide external and support schemes for implementing strategies to provide area deconfliction for UAS operations often in one or both of time and space.
Local employment of particularly sUAS platforms to date tends to be generally autonomous. The local operator of the sUAS platform, for example, may be generally unaware of other aerial platform (manned and unmanned) operations in a vicinity of the operations of his or her sUAS. This situation, of course, lends itself to safety of flight considerations in which individual UAS platforms may interfere with the operations of other manned and unmanned aircraft operating in a vicinity of, or passing through an area of operations of, a particular locally-controlled or remotely-controlled UAS platform.
Conventionally, when employing a sUAS platform, a local “pilot” of the sUAS platform may be provided certain rudimentary traffic deconfliction information, but generally is unconcerned with other operations in a vicinity, and certainly does not coordinate, in a current deployment scheme, operations with the operations of other sUAS platform operators in the area. In this regard, the immediate operation of a particular UAS platform may be considered local, tactical employment of the particular platform. This scenario is operationally played out, for example, when one considers that the pilot of the sUAS platform is in a fixed location within line of sight to the sUAS platform operating a joystick based on observed operations of the sUAS platform, potentially augmented by an actual video feed from the sUAS platform displayed on the operator's console to locally control mission employment of the sUAS platform.
Challenges to increasingly expanded employment of certain UAS platforms include (1) lack of effective oversight for deconfliction and mission reprioritization as between multiple locally-operated unmanned vehicles, and (2) effective employment in operating scenarios in which a locus of the surveillance or other operations undertaken by the UAS platforms may not be locally fixed, i.e., is moving in a planned manner along a pipeline or power line under surveillance, or in an unplanned manner across some open area terrain in an evolving law enforcement surveillance scenario.
Factors complicating integration scenarios for UAS platforms in the NAS include the number of different industries seeking to employ UAS platforms (and/or UAVs, as these terms will be interchangeably used throughout this disclosure) in myriad evolving operating schemes. With national standards existing only loosely, each industry seeks to employ its UAS platforms in such a manner as suits that particular industry's needs. Further, each operating entity operates its UAS platforms according to operating capabilities of the various UAS platforms, and the often only limited and/or ad hoc communications capabilities for providing some rudimentary level of coordination between operators. Finally, there is a difficulty introduced by individual, often proprietary, flight and/or flight plan representation schemes for particular UAS platforms, particular UAS operators and/or UAS operating entities, particular UAS manufacturers and/or particular UAS operations support components that may be largely incompatible with those operated by others.
Putting it another way, with the proliferation of UAS platforms in operation, an increasing need has arisen to provide services (such as; situational awareness, tracking, communications and separation assurance) to more and more UAS platform operators, and to do so without particularly constraining those operators or the UAS operating control entities to being required to employ a particular one of myriad available flight and/or flight plan representation schemes. To date, there is virtually no capability to accept multiple/diverse formats of flight plan representations and/or mission information representation to use and share in a consistent manner with other users of services and/or the airspace in a particular region. This includes virtually no capacity by which to effectively communicate, for example, even with local Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control facilities for safe separation of operations, and the like.
As the proliferation of UAS platforms expands to a number of beneficial deployment scenarios, it is anticipated that multiple vehicles may be operated in a particular locus of operations to provide increased wide-area surveillance or other targeted and/or redundant monitoring capabilities. The UAS platforms, as noted above, can be remotely controlled/piloted, or they can be autonomously operated according to preloaded flight plan representations. As such, there is a developing need for unmanned vehicle operators to be provided some representative flight plan approval/disapproval and/or operational alerts and/or warnings by which the operators may better coordinate their efforts with other operators where appropriate, and with mission controllers and other agency entities, including for example air traffic controllers, to attempt to ensure safe and deconflicted aerial platform operations.